> That's not the only yardstick, is it? Look at how effective large companies are in exploiting loopholes in the tax code of individual (smaller) countries, like Bermuda, Ireland and The Netherlands.

That has nothing to do with what I said. The Claim by OP was that the EU was better at stamping out corruption because it was bigger.

That's demonstrably false. Corruption and bribery existed before the EU as you pointed out and it exists now as well. So this point is mute.

The only difference as I explained in my comment is that now, the entities wishing to corrupt and/or influence don't have to lobby their way into 27 different governments, they can just get cozy with one of the commissioners and push their agenda. Much more efficient and also less costly.

If there is one thing I have learned in my short career as an SDE is that having a single point of failure in your organization is a recipe for disaster. You want redundancy and checks and balances so that not one person can bring the whole thing down.

Here we have the exact opposite. The commissioners are chosen via back-room meetings between the ministers of the member states, their mandates are not revocable by the people, and since there is only one of them, you don't need to reach a consensus to push a new law. That in itself means that they can be easily influenced and their potential for damage is greater.

> The only way out of this tax exploitation is "harmonizing" certain taxes across the EU. That's a sensitive topic, not under the EC's jurisdiction, and progress is slow, but we'll get there.

I am not sure why you are bringing taxes in this thing. That was never the argument.

> Which Germany? Current Germany exists since 1994, and is younger than the EU. Supranational organizations are also not that new, think Holy Roman Empire. That may be taking your argument a bit too literally, but modern states are not that old. Foundations were laid around 200-250 years ago, I'd say, and can hardly be compared with today's. The EU and its predecessors now span 75 years.

That is such a straw man argument. France has a state or Kingdom has existed for a least a thousand of years. Germany was part of an empire before becoming a country that was divided and re-united later on.

My comment was simply highlighting the fact that to the EU absolutists if the EU did not exist things would be worse.

My contention is that countries/kingdoms/sates such as Germany and France existed in one shape or another long before the EU came along. Therefore it is possible to return to this type of states without the need for a supra national entity.

> Just wow. The EU has flaws, but that's an insane comparison.

The CEE's goal was to bring peace to the continent and to facilitate trade between the countries. Now the EU decides the monetary policy of the Eurozone countries, it has its own parliament, there is talk about having it's own army, there is a flag and an anthem. To top it all of the laws of the EU supersede the laws of the member states.

The EU is not so much an union anymore but a burgeoning federal state that has started to swallow all it's member states.

You can look up countless articles about the projects of the most radical EU absolutists such as Martin Shulz who are explicitly calling for the creation of the "United states of Europe".

That in turns would result in each country's parliament becoming more or less useless therefore removing the ability for these nations to govern themselves.

Except in this case the power won't be in Moscow but in Brussels.